page_title: Recycling
section_title: Environmental impact
hierarchical_section_title: Recycling / Criticisms and responses / Environmental impact
caption_attribution_description: English: A metal scrap worker is pictured burning insulated copper wires for copper recovery at Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Tangled up wires ready to be burned for copper recovery are also seen near a metal scrap worker who is waiting to pick up copper pieces left in the soil after a burn.
context_page_description: Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to reacquire the properties it had in its virgin or original state. It is an alternative to "conventional" waste disposal that can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions. Recycling can prevent the waste of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, thereby reducing: energy usage, air pollution, and water pollution.
  Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the third component of the "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle" waste hierarchy. Thus, recycling aims at environmental sustainability by substituting raw material inputs into and redirecting waste outputs out of the economic system. There are some ISO standards related to recycling such as ISO 15270:2008 for plastics waste and ISO 14001:2015 for environmental management control of recycling practice.
  Recyclable materials include many kinds of glass, paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, tires, textiles, batteries, and electronics.
context_section_description: Economist Steven Landsburg, author of a paper entitled "Why I Am Not an Environmentalist", claimed that paper recycling actually reduces tree populations. He argues that because paper companies have incentives to replenish their forests, large demands for paper lead to large forests while reduced demand for paper leads to fewer "farmed" forests.
  When foresting companies cut down trees, more are planted in their place; however, such "farmed" forests are inferior to natural forests in several ways. Farmed forests are not able to fix the soil as quickly as natural forests. This can cause widespread soil erosion and often requiring large amounts of fertilizer to maintain the soil, while containing little tree and wild-life biodiversity compared to virgin forests. Also, the new trees planted are not as big as the trees that were cut down, and the argument that there will be "more trees" is not compelling to forestry advocates when they are counting saplings.
  In particular, wood from tropical rainforests is rarely harvested for paper because of their heterogeneity. According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, the overwhelming direct cause of deforestation is subsistence farming (48% of deforestation) and commercial agriculture (32%), which is linked to food, not paper production.
  The reduction of greenhouse gas emission reduction also benefits from the development of the recycling industry. In Kitakyushu, the only green growth model city in Asia selected by OECD, recycling industries are strongly promoted and financially supported as part of the Eco-town program in Japan. Given the industrial sector in Kitakyushu accounts for more than 60% energy consumption of the city, the development of recycling industry results in substantial energy reduction due to the economies of scale effects; the concentration of CO is, thus, found to decline accordingly.
  Other non-conventional methods of material recycling, like Waste-to-Energy (WTE) systems, have garnered increased attention in the recent past due to the polarizing nature of their emissions. While viewed as a sustainable method of capturing energy from material waste feedstocks by many, others have cited numerous explanations for why the technology has not been scaled globally.
caption: A metal scrap worker is pictured burning insulated copper wires for copper recovery at Agbogbloshie, Ghana.
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